The U.S. demonstrates it will defend allies in Syria

David Ignatius/ The Daily Star

The Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, has disclosed that it suffered heavy casualties when the United States launched drone attacks last month to defend a moderate opposition group that is called “Division 30.”

“The U.S. strikes caused some of our dear brothers to be granted their martyrdom and others got wounded,” wrote a Dutch fighter named Abu Mohammad al-Hollandi in a Twitter posting on July 31, the day of the battle. “We from Nusra decided to make a tactical retreat & thus minimize the possible casualties that could fall because of these strikes.”

The Nusra Front actually lost between 30 and 40 fighters to the U.S. bombing strikes that day, according to one official who is participating in the operation to train and equip Division 30. He said the Nusra group had suffered a kill ratio of 5-to-1 in the pre-dawn assault it mounted against Division 30. This lopsided casualty rate encouraged potential recruits to the “New Syrian Army,” as the moderate force is known, that the United States is serious about defending its allies, the official said.

This new information paints a less bleak view than what I described in a column on Aug. 20 about a “chain of errors” in the Division 30 saga. While American officials concede there were planning and intelligence mistakes, they say the showdown may have ended as a net plus for Syrian moderate forces. By using its drones so aggressively, the U.S. showed it was prepared to fight back after suffering initial reversals.

Postings by Nusra Front members have helped illuminate what happened in the days after 54 U.S.-trained Division 30 fighters were sent into the Syrian border region of Azaz, north of Aleppo, around July 12. Because the opposition group’s target was ISIS, U.S. commanders hadn’t expected that the Nusra Front would attack. But it did – first in a July 29 kidnapping of seven fighters, then in the July 31 assault.

A Nusra Front statement explained the kidnapping as a kind of reconnaissance. “It was incumbent on the Nusra Front to investigate and take caution and be wary of such projects,” said the statement, which was published by the SITE Intelligence Group. “It [Nusra] arrested a number of soldiers in the Division, and the reality of their project was proven to the Front; that they are agents to bring about the projects and interests of America in the region.”

The Dutch fighter explained separately: “After interrogation it became clear for Nusra what this filthy U.S. backed group was up to. And it became clear that the U.S. command center had direct contact with the commanders of ‘Division 30,’ thus making it for the U.S. easy to immediately react with their drones and fighter jets.”

The attack on Division 30 was intended as “a hit and run attack [to] teach them a lesson that we won’t tolerate any group that fights for a foreign country and with a western agenda,” Hollandi said.

The battlefield in northern Syria is confusing because Nusra, until recently, has been a leader in fighting ISIS. Yet the group announced in an Aug. 9 communiqué that it was withdrawing its fighters from the battlezone against ISIS in the region north of Aleppo (termed by U.S. commanders the “Marea Line”) because it didn’t want to collaborate there with the U.S. and Turkey. But a coalition official said moderate fighters had filled in the gap left by the departing Nusra Front, and that heavy air attacks by the U.S. and its allies had pounded ISIS along the Marea Line in recent days.

For the Nusra Front, this appears to have been a tactical retreat. As the communiqué of Aug. 9 explained: “Faced with the current scene, we could only withdraw and leave the points of our vigil with the renegades in the northern Aleppo countryside to be taken over by any fighting faction in those areas.”

The aggressive drone attacks may explain why, despite initial reversals, a Division 30 commander named Abu Iskandar told Al-Aan TV reporter Jenan Moussa on Aug. 20 that, in her words, “he doesn’t bear any grudge against the U.S.” Evidently, American firepower eases the pain of U.S. intelligence and planning mistakes.